Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (6 page)

Jonah thought about that for a few
seconds, then said, “So, because I’m so busy obsessing, I don’t
have time to do the wicked deeds I really, deep down inside, want
to do?”

Tate nodded, then said,
“Your client was another rarity bro. Psychotics rarely attack
people.”

“And your point?”

Now Tate smiled. “He saw
it, bro. He saw beneath the surface.”

For a few seconds, they
stared at each other. Jonah finally said, “Fuck you,
Tate.”

Tate ripped into his
high-pitched laugh. “I’m sorry, bro. I’m just fucking with
you.”

Tate jumped off the table.
“Why do I do it, bro?” Tate asked.

“Because you’re an asshole,” Jonah
replied.

Tate would not bring it up
for the rest of the night, and that particular conversation died.
For Jonah, it would become just one of the many strange battles of
wits he and Tate had. He wouldn’t think of it again, until he
finally figured out that Tate, fucking with him or not, was
right.

#

Any peace of mind Jonah had
derived was thwarted on Monday, one week after he was attacked,
when David called. One of the administrators from SSI was going to
be at David’s main office on Friday to put on a brief training
seminar for all of David’s clinical staff. After the meeting, the
administrator wanted to meet alone with David and Jonah. David said
he thought the administrator probably wanted to talk about the
attack. He said nothing else about it, nothing that would ease
Jonah’s anxiety.

So until Friday, Jonah’s
obsessive mind was left to try and fill in the blanks. Did the
administrator think Jonah had done something to instigate the
attack? Did he want to feel Jonah out? Was he going to try to see
if there was a reason for further investigation? Jonah’s mind
filled with thoughts and images of the administrator and David
laying into him. “We’ve never had this happen before. Other clients
have complained about your lack of courtesy. We’re going to have to
report this to this licensing board.”

Jonah thought of himself
with a marred record, trying to get a job later on, or trying to
get a license. Psychologists weren’t supposed to have people
problems.

Jonah knew he was almost
certainly blowing things out of proportion. He tried to put it all
out of his mind. But it might as well have been the lock on a door
or the power switch of a coffee burner. The more he tried to ignore
these thoughts, the more his mind resisted him.

Jonah usually used Thursday
to start calling in his reports from the previous three days. But
this Thursday, he was frozen, his mind too occupied to concentrate.
He decided to put off all his work until he got back from Lansing
the next day. Then, Friday, he made the trip.

The main office in Lansing
was usually better kept than the auxiliary office in Stanton, but
not much. The Lansing office was still generally a bit untidy for
what would be expected of the profession. Part of that was the
clientele. Disability clients were often messy to have around.
Sometimes they brought in several kids and basically let them run
rampant. Another part of the reason for the sloppiness, Jonah
suspected, was that David was too busy counting his money to really
care. But on this Friday, with the administrator in town, the
office was neat and sterile.

The seminar was held in one
of the assessment rooms. A variety of chairs were pushed back
against the wall. Coffee and donuts were set out on the desk. Jonah
had never met the other staff psychologists before today. Though he
might have guessed it, he hadn’t known that he was the exception to
the rule. The eight other staff psychologists that worked for David
were relatively attractive women. Even in his anxiety over the
later meeting, Jonah still took the time to picture himself in Dr.
Meade’s position: Suave, rich, very little direct clinical work,
freeing up his time to play—with some of the staff maybe. But,
though Jonah would probably have the credentials soon, and probably
the clinical skills too, he doubted he could ever be like David.
Most of what David did was indirect supervision of his staff and
playing politics with SSI and the other people his staff performed
psychological services for. Good politics and supervision was
probably as lucrative of a combination as a psychologist could
have. Politics required the ability to feign good will towards
people. Jonah just wasn’t good at that. And the indirect nature of
performing supervision, trusting someone else with something he
could be held accountable for, would drive him nuts. With OCD, you
needed to be there, to see with your own eyes, hear with your own
ears, or you would go nuts. Or, at least, you thought you’d go
nuts. And that was motivation enough not to risk it.

Donald Cushing, the SSI
administrator, was a short man in a suit that swallowed him. His
eyes were small and beady and nearly disappeared when he smiled. He
was skilled in his rhetoric, half politician, half salesman,
getting the point of what he wanted from them across but not making
any direct committal statements that he might be held accountable
for later.

The
purpose of the seminar was to help the staff with its reports. It
only served to make Jonah more nervous. Cushing seemed to be
focusing in on Jonah, frequently looking at him and nodding when he
made his points. Jonah thought it might be a sexist thing, Jonah
the only other male in the room. He thought he was already doing
all Cushing was asking for, and the examples Cushing gave seemed
familiar enough. Still, Jonah couldn’t help but feel that Cushing
was actually trying to correct him in particular.
Look, dude, this is how you do
it.

David hadn’t attended the
seminar, but he showed up afterward and offered to buy everyone a
late lunch. They agreed to meet at a nearby restaurant in about an
hour. First, Dr. Meade had to meet with Don Cushing and Jonah. With
the rest of the staff cleared out, they met back in the room where
David usually conducted supervision. Cushing and David sat on one
side of the desk, Jonah on the other. After some brief small talk,
Cushing started in.

“I understand you were attacked by a
client,” Cushing said.

Jonah felt what had been a
fairly strong but steady sense of anxiety surge to a debilitating
level. His chest tightened, and he immediately grew numb. The two
men across from him were still there but almost like they were in
the background. He tried to respond verbally, but he couldn’t find
the air to make his voice work. All he could do was nod and hope
they didn’t see how much he had been affected.

“I feel I should apologize
for that,” Jonah heard Cushing say as if somewhere in the distance.
The next thing Cushing said was something about the rarity of the
act. He then went on to the unpredictability of it. Jonah only
nodded, taking in a part of what Cushing said. His focus was still
inside, where his anxiety was dropping rapidly. Not only were
Cushing’s words telling him that he was free of blame, so was
Cushing’s body language. It was fake, but at least what Cushing was
faking was regret.

Cushing finished with a question about
Jonah’s condition.

Jonah was able to respond.
“Oh, I’m fine. It was only a mild concussion.”

Both Cushing and David
smiled at him warmly. They then looked at each other as if in
awe.

Cushing turned back to Jonah and
asked, “The examples I used in the other room, did they sound
familiar to you?”

Jonah nodded. “They sounded
similar to what I try to do.”

Both Cushing and David
laughed. Cushing said, “They should. They were all
yours.”

It took Jonah a few seconds
to register what he had just heard. With all of his pessimism about
today, he just wasn’t prepared for a compliment.

“And it’s not that I just
brought them for this particular seminar. I use them every time I
put this seminar on. Yours are by far the best reports I’ve ever
seen.”

Jonah hated this, in a way.
He felt the sense of pride that most people would feel upon being
told that they were the best at something. But he hated it, because
he didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know how to take a
compliment. Luckily, Cushing continued.

“You always stay close to
the data. We always get these reports from people without enough
information to support the diagnoses they make. And they seem to
feel that everyone needs a diagnosis. It’s like they feel
personally responsible for the person they’re
assessing.”

Jonah nodded.

“But what they don’t realize is that,
for our purposes, any diagnosis without clear clinical observations
to support it is as good as no diagnosis at all.”

Again, Jonah nodded. And he
wasn’t just being a yes-man. He truly understood what Cushing was
talking about. There was always the pull to give the client a
diagnosis, to avoid being the person who prevented them from
getting the money. But with Jonah, of course, the pull to stick to
the data was even stronger. It was his sickness. It was as Tate had
said: Jonah was afraid of losing. And if he didn’t stick close to
the data, someone might call him on one of his
reports—losing.

His sickness was paying
off.

“You don’t have that
problem,” Cushing said. “You call a spade a spade. You keep the
people who really don’t need it from getting the money, and allow
the ones who do need it to get support. I wish we had a dozen more
like you.”

Jonah had made the
malingering diagnosis a few times, when the client faked it bad
enough that Jonah could support such a diagnosis. But he suspected
that was related to his illness in yet another way. Jonah, himself,
was clearly OCD, and he felt the pain of that. So for someone else
to come in and fake a mental illness was insulting in a way. The
malingering diagnosis, though accurate when he made it, was a sort
of revenge.

“You know, Jonah, after you
send one of your reports in, it goes in the client's file. That
file also contains reports from the client’s physician and his or
her current therapist, any professional that deals with him or her.
These records sometimes go back ten or fifteen years. Each time the
client comes up for review, one of our examiners reviews all of
this information and makes a determination.”

Cushing stopped to laugh.
“The examiners love it when your reports come in. Hell, half of
them know they can pretty much disregard anything else from the
other mental health reports, because yours will be the most
accurate.”

Cushing stopped, and Jonah
got the cue that he should say something now. “Oh,” he said. Then
he said, “Wow!”

“Now, David tells me you’ll
be fully licensed in a few months.”

Jonah started to contest
this. He still had nearly a year. But the look on David’s face,
which Cushing could not see, was telling Jonah that he should hold
off.

“The examiner position starts out at
sixty grand a year, and benefits.”

Had Cushing said forty
grand, Jonah still would have seen the dollar signs. Sixty was way
more than he had been told he could expect to make starting
out.

“If you’re interested, you
should go ahead and get your resume in. But consider it more of a
technicality than anything. With the reputation you’ve established,
just having your name at the top will make you a shoe in.” Cushing
winked. “It’s just something to consider.” Cushing turned to David.
“I guess I’ve used enough of your supervision time for my
recruitment purposes.” Cushing stood up. “I’ll wait outside while
you finish up.”

“Oh. We won’t be long,”
David said as Cushing walked out.

With Cushing out of the
room, David looked a lot less like a boss and a lot more like a
buddy. He said in a lowered voice, “I knew about the reports.”
David shook his head and laughed quietly. “I didn’t know he was
going to offer you a job.”

Jonah heard David, but his
mind was still on the sixty grand. And to do what? Review the
records supplied by other people. Never see a client again. Spend
most of his time looking at paper.

“The sneaky bastard,” David
said, not angrily, but with a bantering admiration. “I just told
him that you were my best and that I intended on making you a good
offer when you got your license.”

Jonah made eye contact. The
gesture was just a reflex brought on by being surprised at David’s
words, but by David’s reaction, he took it as meaning, “Tell me
more.”

“Fifty percent of what you
bring in,” David said, then stared at Jonah with waiting
eyes.

Jonah did
the math in his head. Thirty hours a week at ninety dollars a pop
was $2,700. Subtract David’s share, and Jonah got $1,350 a week.
Times fifty weeks was $67,500. That was a little more than what
Cushing had offered, but David wouldn’t offer benefits, and David
would make him deal with actual people.
No
chance.

After a few seconds of
Jonah giving him no sign, David, who probably had not done the math
in his head that Jonah had done, said, “Well, you got a few months
to think about it, anyway.”

A few months? Now both
Cushing and David were saying it. Jonah suspected that David was
just confused on when Jonah had started. Jonah said, “By a few, you
mean twelve.”